The Week in Washington: “We’re Fighting All the Subpoenas!”

A new low, in a week of lows! On Friday, President Trump stood on the White House lawn and lauded Civil War general Robert E. Lee, who headed an army hell-bent on destroying the United States and preserving the institution of slavery. At the crack of dawn on Wednesday, the president, apparently waking up in a rage, tweeted, “The Mueller Report, despite being written by Angry Democrats and Trump Haters, and with unlimited money behind it ($35,000,000), didn’t lay a glove on me. I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court.” In addition to his erroneous belief that the Supreme Court plays a role in impeachment proceedings—they do not—doesn’t it strike you that “didn’t lay a glove on me” hardly sounds like the words of an innocent man? The day before, the president hyperventilated: “I wonder if the New York Times will apologize to me a second time, as they did after the 2016 Election. But this one will have to be a far bigger & better apology. On this one they will have to get down on their knees & beg for forgiveness—they are truly the Enemy of the People!”

On Wednesday, this “enemy of the people” ran a piece with the headline “Trump Vows Stonewall of ‘All’ House Subpoenas, Setting Up Fight Over Powers,” which sadly was not referencing the Greenwich Village bar that is considered the birthplace of the gay liberation movement. Instead, the article cataloged all the ways the president intends to thwart Congress's attempts to oversee his administration. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” he announced to reporters last week. “These aren’t, like, impartial people.”

In other news, on Friday The Washington Postreported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, apparently in a panic over the prospect of losing his job after the Times reported that he had suggested wearing a wire to surreptitiously record the president, saved his skin last year by convincing Trump that, “I give the [Mueller] investigation credibility. I can land the plane.” (Note to the deputy AG: You are not supposed to be landing aircraft for the president! You work for the American people, not one person!) On Tuesday, Jared Kushner, in a rare public appearance at the Time 100 Summit, argued that the Mueller probe was worse for the country than foreign election meddling. “You look at what Russia did—you know, buying some Facebook ads and try to sow dissent and do it, and it’s a terrible thing,” he intoned, “but I think the investigations and all the speculation that has happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on democracy than a couple Facebook ads.”

And further to the next election, on Thursday Joe Biden finally announced his candidacy. (Is the third time the charm? He also ran in 1998 and 2008.) He launched his campaign with a video that directly attacked the president for his comments after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, prompting Trump’s musings on the traitorous Robert E. Lee. (Trump now claims that his notorious “very fine people on both sides” Charlottesville remarks were in support of people trying to preserve a Lee statue, but a glance at the videotape confirms that this is a bald-faced lie.)

Lastly, Saturday night, after yet another tragic day in America, with a murderous shooting in a California synagogue, the president once again vilified the fourth estate. At a Green Bay, Wisconsin, rally he called in lieu of attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—virtually none of his henchmen and women were at that annual event, which celebrates the First Amendment—he whipped up the crowd by pointing to the journalists in the arena and shouting, “Fake news. They’re fake. They are fake. They are fakers.”

But even as Trump indulged in his noxious name-calling, WHCA president Olivier Knox reminded his audience, “It shouldn’t need to be said in a room full of people who understand the power of words that ‘fake news’ and ‘enemies of the people’ are not pet names, punchlines, or presidential.” And the keynote speaker, presidential historian Ron Chernow—quite a switcheroo from last year’s controversial comedian Michelle Wolf—nevertheless injected a bit of humor in his remarks, ending by paraphrasing a quote from Mark Twain: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often—and for the same reason.”